Today's Four Links are of the educational variety. Follow a couple and learn something new!
1. Packaging Design at Its Worst
Treehugger has a gallery of packaging designs that are wasteful and, in one case, downright dangerous.
2. What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter
One of the better articles I've read on making effective use of Twitter. I appreciate the fact that the authors use real tweets as examples instead of simply making broad, unsupported generalizations.
3. Want more sign-ups? Don't lead with "Free" offers
In user testing, 37signals found that a call-to-action button with the copy "See Plans and Pricing" resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups over variations on "Sign-up for a Free Trial".
It seems that people are weary of "free" things online as they are often a gateway to unwanted subscriptions and opt-out schemes.
4. How to Monetize a Free Service
Okay, that title's a bit misleading.
But we could learn something from the actions of Pandora CEO Tim Founder on how to make the move from free to freemium. Founder broke the news to his customers in a sensitive and well-reasoned letter that's worth reading.
Make a great service and treat your customers like intelligent people. That's something we can all subscribe to.
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Nick — Jul 23, 2009
Can unethical tactics become blueprints for ethical success? DLB puts on its lab coat and dissects opt-out schemes to find out.
On Tuesday, I wrote about “opt-out” or “negative option” practices --okay, scams-- wherein customers unwittingly agree to subscription services which they are charged for in deliberately obfuscated ways. To get out of the arrangement, the customer has to explicitly state they do not want to be charged (this is easier said than done); hence, the opt-out moniker.
As white-hat designers, what can we learn from this unethical behavior?
Last time, we identified the common elements of an opt-out scam. Let’s see if doing the opposite can’t turn this around—and then some.
Read More...
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Nick — Nov 6, 2008
With today’s post, we are officially inaugurating a taxonomy of unethical designs. Our hope is that by collecting and categorizing all the questionable practices out there, we can uncover the thinking patterns that underlie unethical decisions and come up with alternatives.
If you’ve got a TV, you’ve probably seen those free credit report commercials in high rotation. Well, as it turns out, the report isn’t really free at all. To get it, you have to sign up for a trial membership in a credit monitoring service. Once that trial expires, you’ll be billed monthly until you cancel. The thing is, you probably didn’t know you were signing up for the membership or when the trial period took place. You may not even spot the charge on your credit card for some time. When you try to cancel, you find that you’re obligated to a one year membership.
And that, folks, is where "free" becomes unethical.
Read More...
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Nick — Nov 4, 2008
